One can reasonably assume that the planned presence of U.S. forces amid a Turkish invasion has the sole purpose of deterring Russian or Syrian moves against it. With U.S. forces around the Russian command will have to think twice before bombing any Turkish advance beyond the borders of their agreement with the Russians.

The deployment of some 40 U.S. special forces to Al Ra’i did not go well. The Turkish “Free Syrian Army” proxies threatened to kill the U.S. forces (see video). They called them “unbelievers” and “crusader pigs” and the U.S. forces had to retreat under Turkish cover….

The Turkish supported sectarian “moderate” FSA groups are the very same groups the CIA has “vetted” and provided with TOW missiles and other weapons.

Islamic State fighters are illegally using guns and other weapons made in Eastern European factories, in a newly-discovered supply chain that is “almost direct”, a weapons expert has claimed.

James Bevan, the director of Conflict Armament Research (CAR)… said CAR is currently challenging the governments of Bulgaria and Serbia, among others, over the sale of weapons to Saudi Arabia.

Despite signing an ‘End User’ agreement saying it will use the weapons itself and not sell these them to any other countries, Saudi Arabia appears to send them “straight to Turkey”, from where they get into Islamic State’s hands “very, very rapidly”…

Bevan said his evidence… showed that anyone supplying weapons one of the many rebel Syrian opposition groups has “absolutely no control” over where they end up. Syrian factions that supposedly oppose IS often merge with them or work with them, leading to weapons quickly getting into IS possession, he explained.

Some foreign powers trying to help groups fighting IS are actually backing “pretty hard line Islamist forces,” he claimed, adding that: “it’s very difficult to distinguish between them and Islamic State….”

CAR’s teams have tracked nearly half a million weapons and pieces of ammunition in two years, using serial numbers and markings that link each item to a specific factory.

US and Russia reached a deal on Syria for a ceasefire, humanitarian aid, and later military cooperation and a roadmap for political transition. The Syrian government accepted the deal while the major opposition rebel groups rejected it, issuing some demands to secure their agreement. The ceasefire officially began on Monday evening. Details of the deal are trickling out, the White House is publicly doubting Russia, privately arguing among themselves, and in response Russia wants to publish the (withheld) text of the deal.

Al Qaeda and Ahrar al-Sham rebel groups launched an offensive in the Golan Heights region against the Syrian military, allegedy with air support from the Israeli air force. The Syrian military claims that their air defense shot down an Israeli fighter jet and a drone. The Israeli military denies the shootdown but confirms recent airstrikes on Syria.

Kurds report that ISIS fighters are fleeing the Turkish border offensive in Syria and joining al Qaeda groups in Aleppo. BBC interviewed surrendering rebels in Daraya who say they joined due to financial hardship and the revolution is a lie. In Ukraine, Stephen Cohen says that Pres. Poroshenko has unilaterally changed the terms of the Minsk deal.

The new ceasefire agreement between Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, which went into effect at noon Monday, has a new central compromise absent from the earlier ceasefire agreement that the same two men negotiated last February. But it isn’t clear that it will produce markedly different results.

ISIS will still be connected to Turkey. But its fighting power is severely diminished and it is already falling back into guerrilla mode. It now mostly avoids open battles. It will be ground down over time.

Surprises may still come from ISIS as it has some very well trained personnel. Its new military commander is Gulmurod Khalimov, a special forces officer from Tajikistan, long trained in counterterrorism by U.S. advisors and special forces. He replaces the dead Abu Omar al-Shishani, a Chechen special force officer from Georgia, long trained in counterterrorism by U.S. advisors and special forces.

NBC just mentions that “U.S. personnel were dispatched”. That sounds like a bureaucrat drove to the border to help the “journalist” to enter Turkey. But that “U.S. personnel” consisted of two armed drones and several military helicopters which flew in the area over several days while the exfiltration of Snell was ongoing. Has anyone ever heard of any journalist for whom the U.S. military would launch such an extensive operation? The Turkish media had made no secret of what happened.

It took a remarkable degree of denial and self-deception for the Obama administration to believe that it was somehow acting to rescue the Syrian people from the bloodletting when it was doing precisely the opposite.

No matter how brutal its rule and its war tactics have been, a war to overthrow the Assad regime could only plunge the country into a terrible sectarian bloodbath. And the consequences of the sectarian war will continue for years into the future. The Obama administration’s failure to firmly reject that war should be viewed as one of the worst of the long parade of American transgressions in the Middle East.

Turkey is moving into Syria not just with its own military, but with thousands of “rebel opposition groups” including US-backed FSA brigades allied with AlQaeda/Nusra/Sham and the child head-chopping al-Zinki who are reported to form the vanguard. Syrian territory is outright being turned over to them by the Turkish military, simply exchanging control from one group of terrorist jihadis (ISIS) to others who are more media acceptable and more direct proxies of the Erdogan regime, the U.S., Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

That said, ISIS has not resisted the Turkish advance at all – simply “melting away” (or exchanging one set of uniforms for another?). No stay-behinds, no suicide bombers, no IEDS, nothing. No fighting. Zero casualties. Turkish and “Syrian rebel” forces literally strolled in to Jarablus taking selfies and posing for cameras. Tag-team turnover.